2008-10-18

I've had an iPhone since somewhere in July, and had GrandCentral since last September.... GrandCentral gave me visual voicemail on my BlackBerry and saved me minutes (since it used my unlimited data plan, but this doesn't really matter since T-Mobile now give unlimited minutes to voicemail). Sadly, Google never made GrandCentral's mobile (or other) site work on the iPhone, so I was left in the dark.

I quickly realized why Mobile Safari couldn't play what GrandCentral mobile returns, but I was too lazy to do anything with that knowledge. That is, until Yahoo! and God himself (creator of PHP) came to my school.

The Premise of HackU is "a day-long festival of coding, camaraderie, demos, awards, food, music and jollity (it’s a real word, look it up). It’s not about perfect code, just your creativity, a cool idea and a working prototype." [HackU Oct 18, 2008] Well, this isn't really a prototype... it's a full blown product! I owe any style (in the buttons and background), and the multiple message code to Jeffrey Sung.

If you have an iPhone and a GrandCentral account, try it out by going to http://rectu.ms/iphone on your iPhone! (Note: the site will only display properly on Safari, Mobile Safari, or Google Chrome) Also, I have submitted the WebApp to Apple for possible inclusion at their WebApps page.

If you're really interested, you can see the presentation I gave at HackU bellow... or even email me for the code (soon to be released under GPL).

2008-08-18

Google Calendar now has the CalDAV API open! More information can be found here.

What does this mean? You can now fully (bidirectional) sync your Google Calendar with Apple's iCal or Mozilla's SunBird without using expensive applications like Spanning Sync or CompanionLink for Google! What it means for ME is that now I can sync my iPhone with Google Calendar (albeit not without syncing it with my Mac). So long NemusSync, for now.

Instructions for iCal can be found here, or read on:Simply open iCal (currently version 3.0.4 build 1263) and open it's preferences (?+,). Go to the Accounts tab and click the plus sign under the (empty?) list. The description is up to you, but the username and password have to be your full Google login (ie: you@gmail.com or if you use Google Apps you@company.com). To make things work, the key trick is to click the arrow for server options and enter the specific Account URL for your calendar: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/calid/user and ONLY change the calid. CalID is your calendar's name inside Google, and if you only have one main calendar it will probably be the same as your login.